As this proposal has now become reality, I've renamed this thread. This is now the Team OSCAR general jibber-jabber thread.

After I get the stickies sorted - either it's user error or I've not got the right privileges - this forum should hopefully be a little more content filled. I'll be opening a project thread later today to get the ball rolling.

EDIT: Stickying done. I've had good experiences with stickying general discussion threads in forums which will have lots of disparate topics, so I've stickied this thread.

I'll be hanging out on #OpenUru from now on. You can find the link to join the IRC on the Community page. Also, I'll be setting up Skype pretty soon. Skype should, hopefully, make conversations a little less word based, and it's far easier to converse via tongue than keyboard!

Ugh, I need to stop with my habit of shirking work. It's too tempting to not do much with my final summer as a student.

Anyway. I've been thinking about the limited things I can do with Plasma as it stands, and certainly with Andy's placing up of a couple of his old projects, I've now got a little bit of an idea on what I myself am going to be doing.

The people who want to make Uru do snazzy things need 3d artists to make the snazzy things look nice. But it's a bit silly to expect the programmer or even the casual designer to work on a project at it's very start. But with the Page system - indeed, with this open system that OSCAR operates in - it's very easy for them to start working far after the graphics design is completed. Even the most empty garden age can be turned into something very complex via adding a few page files. So, for the time being, it seems like a good idea to work on the graphics, which will provide people with ages that they themselves can add to. I think this is a good compromise between endlessly worrying about how a complete age can be created and simply setting sights too low to be useful.

EDIT: And of course the critical advantage is that these page files can be made in anything that can export a Plasma file. Most coders prefer working in Blender, after all.

If you have a large project (like an age with many different places), having those places on different pages can provide a very good advantage, such as paging those areas in and out, instead of having to rely on vis regions.

Splitting up areas that different people are working on, in Max you can have one area saved as it's own max file, while another is yet another max file, with the files being merged before export. As long as you go up to where the Plasma menu is, you can save selected and merge without loosing any of the Plasma "wiring" that is done to that file.
Main problems you can run into is location (having someone's cave end up in your living room, heh), some lighting issues as one source of Max Standard light may be used for more than one area, and then there is the naming of objects that need to be unique (IE so that when you merge there are no duplicate names of objects).

In theory, you could also have say 2 people working on the same age and different areas, but one is using Blender and one is using Max. The problem then however is merging the raw project files (either in Blender or Max), as the "wiring" will not be carried over.
However, if the age is going to be "slipped" on to say a shard with it's age files, then this will not be a problem as the exported prp's will still work. So it is very possible for 2 different graphic program users to work on the same project in that way.

I agree with you on making things look as nice as possible first, then work on the more complex interactions. Too many times I have rushed (or been rushed) in getting things done, and I know there are walls, grounds, etc that I could have made look much, much nicer. It's also possible to get so caught up that you forget about something that you just "threw" a quick texture on, and meant to come back later to make it better.